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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/18/there-is-a-frightening-defect-in-the-israel-hamas-deal/
The Terrorists Live to Fight On
(Telegraph-UK) Charles Moore - The ceasefire deal legitimates Hamas as a continuing force in Gaza. They will remain on the ground and Israel will not. Hamas now knows they will be part of future negotiations. Plenty of malign actors - many of them in Western governments, policy elites and media - will even start to hail them as peacemakers. Moreover, the deal will prove that hostage-taking works. If Hamas had simply murdered those 1,200 plus people on Oct. 7, they would have won themselves no protection against Israeli retaliation. Because they took the hostages, they were able to make Israel hesitate. The deal will also be seen in Islamist minds as a successful precedent. Capture Jews, will be the internal message, torture them, kill a proportion of them, play cat-and-mouse about the ones who live, and it will give you power. So, when you get the chance, do it again. As the country founded to offer refuge to Jews everywhere, Israel has a Talmudically inspired duty to rescue them wherever it can. It is pierced, too, by the deep personal pain inflicted on so many families. Politically, it may be that there is an Israeli consensus round the idea that this deal is, as one Jewish friend expert in the region put it to me, "bad, but essential." But I cannot let go of the point that, with this deal, Hamas have pried open the jaws of defeat and won, if not a victory, at least the chance to live and fight and murder for much more than another day. The writer, a member of the House of Lords, is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, and the Sunday Telegraph.